Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism by Yaacov Yadgar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism by Yaacov Yadgar Motti Inbari Yaacov Yadgar. Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017. Vii+ 288 pp. Cloth $85.00. ISBN: 978-1438465340. Sovereign Jews "deconstruct[s]" and "critically analyze[s]" the secular-religious binary among Israeli Jews. Yaacov Yadgar argues, stemming from the Marxist notion of false consciousness, that Israeli "seculars" are living a lie regarding their so called secularity. Although the majority of Israelis define themselves as hilonim (seculars), their true identity is an "ethno-national identity" that distinguishes them from Arabs. In order to prove his point, Yadgar rebuts leading Zionist thinkers; among his targets are Gideon Shimoni, Shlomo Avineri and A.B. Yehoshua. The common understanding of Judaism and Jewish identity in the Zionist project, and later in the State of Israel, tends to see Judaism as civilization [End Page 307] that contains what we refer to as "religion," with rituals, sacred texts, a set of ethics and beliefs, but also a "nation" by which all Jews are members of one community. Some of these national notions can be explained by the fact that Jewish identity is matrilineal, thus it makes Judaism almost like a race, but ancient Jewish texts had also emphasized that all Jews are responsible for one another, and this responsibility can be understood as being connected by mutual past, heritage, and language. Whereas before modern times all these components were viewed as holistic, meaning that the religious and national were combined, the project of the modernization of the Jewish people intended to break the bond. Thus Zionism elevated the national component while downplaying the religious component. The Jewishness of Zionism was not in its loyalty to rituals, but in the loyalty to the nation. Yadgar argues that this analysis is false and misleading, resulting in an unauthentic adaptation of a Protestant model of modernity. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part Yadgar explains that the Reformation was a catalyst for the invention of religion. "Religion," this distinct category of human activity, was invented to separate it from other activities such as culture, politics, and other realms of the modern West. The transformation of religion into the private, universal, and apolitical matter came hand in hand with the rise of sovereign states in Europe. As the state strove for monopoly over the use of violence, it reduced the power of the church and pushed religion into a matter of personal piety. Yadgar claims that a similar process took place among the Jews. Moses Mendelsohn called for an adjustment to the Jewish life in Germany in the eighteenth century, while arguing that Judaism does not strive for power; thus was absent a political dimension. This would enable the inclusion of Jews inside the political order of the modern nation state and there would be no conflict between being Jewish and being loyal to the state. Both Reform and Orthodox streams of thought agreed with Mendelsohn's analysis that Judaism is not political. The second part of the book deals with the Zionist narrative regarding Jewish traditions. He quotes Shlomo Avineri, a famous Zionist scholar, who argued that the Israeli nation state is the ultimate substitute for the traditional Jewish religion. (70) Yadgar says that in Avineri's analysis, the state emerges as positioned at the very heart of the Jewish people's existence, as the only agent installing meaningful content into the collectivity. He continues with two Zionist thinkers who developed an opinion on Judaism: Ahad Ha'am, who demanded a reinterpretation of Jewish tradition in order to secularize Judaism and to replace religion with national pride, and Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, who completely negated the religious tradition in favor of absolute individual sovereignty. According to him, there is no place for dialogue with tradition in order to reinterpret it, but a complete release from its essence is required. His Jewishness, he argued, was a biological component which he cannot control, just like race. The third part of the book turns to the Israeli nation-state. Yadgar opens his discussion with the paradox that although Zionism has been a harsh [End Page 308] critic of tradition, Zionism nevertheless defined itself...